HEALING HANDS

Some hands can heal. This seems to be a miracle but is actually a physical process that takes place through bio-magnetic fields. Scientific research shows that bio-magnetic energy emanated by the practitioner resonates with particular molecules in the receiver and initiate a cascade of events that can stimulate the repair of cells and tissue.

Such healing effects are studied in differentiated ways. For instance, research presents evidence of certain frequencies emitted from practitioner’s hands that ‘jump-start’ healing processes in receivers.

Although scientific research strongly suggests that healing may be initiated, less certain is that everybody can sense the resonance and use it to ‘tune in’ to imbalanced areas by providing proper electromagnetic fingerprints. Able body-workers sense more and can develop brain rhythms that lead to stronger and more coherent magnetic fields which facilitate detection and repair in the receiver.

Biophysicist James Oschman has brought together evidence from a range of disciplines to provide an acceptable explanation for the energetic exchanges that take place in body-mind therapies. He addresses a growing interest in the role of natural energies in maintaining health and wellbeing. http://energymedicineuniversity.org/faculty/oschman.html

While solid knowledge is growing, much is still hypothetical and waits for scientific studies that can reject or confirm implicit beliefs and explicit statements.

~ Courtesy: Elise Pattyn

SCIENCE AND ASTROLOGY

It is scientific to say that without knowledge of scientific proof we cannot have an opinion, including about astrology. But a scientist would appreciate curious colleagues who take astrology as an object of study, just like chemists study molecules, economists study capitalism or physicists study gravity.

There is an endless number of hypotheses to be derived from the astrology books, tested and statistically analyzed. But even if a hundred hypotheses are rejected we can still not say that astrology has no validity because a much larger of number of hypotheses could be confirmed. On the other hand, even if a hundred hypotheses are confirmed we can still not say that astrology has validity because a much larger of number of hypotheses could be rejected.

The curious scientist may not only appreciate the testing of statistical relations between stellar constellations and human behaviors, but also value the physical research that increasingly confirms energy relations of different frequencies that occur at many levels, from the molecule to the universe, and may produce cause-and-effect relationships between the behaviors of stars and humans.

And the curious scientist, aware of what physicists have realized for long already, knows that cause-and-effect cannot explain everything that happens but that synchronicity sometimes replaces causal relations. For instance, in 1964 the scientist J.S. Bell, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, has found that the supposedly separate parts of the universe are in fact connected in an intimate and immediate way. It provides repeatedly tested proof that cause-and-effect thinking cannot explain everything.

The shocking news is that science has shown its own limitations. And even after half a century this conclusion is far from being understood in its consequences. The word synchronicity is the proper term to be applied here. The same word synchronicity may apply to what astrologers study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

PARADISE OR WISDOM

As fetuses and infants we live with subconscious illusions of total comfort, perfection, grandiosity, timelessness, limitlessness, centrality, almightiness and total control. We usually overcome such paradisiacal illusions only to a certain extent and ban, under pressures of the social and physical environment, other parts of those illusions to the back of our minds. Developmental psychology has been demonstrating those features since the 1970s.

Now, when conditions allow, those subconsciously remaining parts of infant illusions can grasp their chances, come back to the fore and infuse our feeling, thinking and acting. Growing wealth, social power, spiritual enlightenment, technology or car driving, for instance, can remobilize our undigested paradisiacal illusions, until real life unmasks our reappeared fantasies.

For quite some prominent people, overcoming the subconscious paradisiacal illusions of early childhood is just too hard. Instead of helping them to deal with reality on the ground, their fame or power inflated their illusions and made them derail, even to a fatal extent.

Exposed rapists such as IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn and American TV hero Bill Cosby, or the  fatally addicted singer Amy Winehouse are recent examples.

Others, on the other hand, are fortunately in a position where they can honestly and courageously confront themselves with early paradisiacal illusions that are still lurking in them. They may even develop real wisdom.

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: JUNGLE OR TEMPLE

Meditation calms down your racing mind, but is not meant to close yourself off from noticing what happens in yourself or depart for a dream in paradise. Meditation is meant to open yourself up and observe everything that happens, with all your senses and energy frequencies.

In that way, moments of meditation substitute the life that was permanently lived by our ancestors. They were constantly alert, always aware of details in their natural environment, with all their senses and energy frequencies relating to nature. For them, like for animals and plants, it was a matter of life or death to stay in contact with the environment.

That state can be called situational awareness. We have largely lost that capacity, at the cost of our health and natural recovery processes. While our urge to survive increasingly lost the need of situational awareness, this loss made us increasingly vulnerable for new diseases. But nowadays, attempts to relearn situational awareness are coming up and prevent those new diseases.

Now, to be certain, meditation was not only borne out of observational or relational impoverishment, or as a substitute for situational awareness. It came to add a second type of awareness, the awareness of awareness, the noticing that we notice.

Perhaps the challenge is to both recreate the old situational awareness for physical health purposes and further develop the consciousness of ourselves for spiritual health purposes, while considering that both processes have lots of inter-linkages.

http://origins.well.org/movie/

POSTMODERN EXTENDED FAMILIES

In the postmodern West we increasingly find children living in two households, one of their divorced mother and of one their divorced father. Not uncommon is that they meet children from the earlier marriage of their mother’s new man. Similarly their father may have a new wife with children from her earlier marriage and those children can also meet each other.

The children of those new partners may also live in the household of their other parent where they can meet, again, children of a new parent there. In  this way, chains of children meeting each other in different households arise.

It would be interesting to know how such kids adapt to the laterally extending family lines and how they bring their absorbed experiences into the wider world. As the new kinship system shows both more fragmentation and more integration, which is typical for postmodernity, this system may further contribute to postmodernity.

WOMEN AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Quite likely, women never ruled the ‘outside’ world. Matriarchal communities have been rare, whereas female figurines are shown to be unrelated to domination of either sex.

People in tribal societies, onwards from about 25,000 years ago, made small, voluptuous female figurines that are thought to represent nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or the bounty of the earth. Others believe these figurines were made by men to express their sexual longing for women.

Some believe the female figurines represent matriarchal or female-dominated society but there is no evidence for that belief, whereas in tribal societies women and men tend to only have a division of labor, with women mostly collecting plant food and men mostly collecting animal food, which remains unrelated to domination by either sex.

Furthermore, agrarian societies, from over the last 10,000 years, also made female figurines whereas these societies are clearly patriarchal or male dominated. Male dominance arose with agriculture with men gradually leaving the domain of hunting and pushing women out of control in the domain of plant food, although women kept working a lot in agriculture.

But we may not underestimate the indirect power of women if it comes to the ‘outside’ world. In the ‘inside’ world, women have a strong influence on what men do in the ‘outside’ world. As spouses and even more so as mothers they shape the behaviors of men, mostly along the lines of the particular cultures that women and men live in.

COMPUTERS, MANAGERS AND MERGERS

Three historical reforms blew through the company when I worked there before I could go for university studies. But they were far from the idealistic flower power, democratization,  decolonization and anti-racism movements of those revolutionary 1960s. Sure, the sixties brought revolution, but in the world of business revolution had other faces.

Most conspicuous for us, workers at Spaarnestad, leading magazine and book publishers, was the invasion of the computer. Reliable, respected bookkeepers were swept under the table or disappeared with heart diseases and stomach ulcers when the new wind demanded to adjust or perish, while others relished about the new opportunities provided by the dynamic computer department headed by Mr. Tuinman. I can still see him before me.

The second trend that emerged was the shift of emphasis from technical leaders to financial managers. Mr. De Goeij, a sophisticated printing engineer, got the smart economist Mr Emondts at his side, if not above him. Emondts rapidly transformed the company of technicians, writers and artists into a machinery geared towards pleasing the shareholders and paying bonuses.

The third change came when a series of mergers with other printing and publishing companies took place, Geïllustreerde Pers, headed by Mr Charles De Roy van Zuydewijn, being the largest partner. The new company came to be called United Dutch Publishers (VNU). The aim was to get bigger and bigger, with higher and higher positions for the managers, a not unattractive prospect for the leading negotiators. The managers physically cut the ties with the workers by leaving their buildings and settling as the central board of directors in a luxurious villa.

Predictably, the leaders shifted their interest from content matter to the selling and buying of companies at the international market. In fact, their focus moved from Holland to Wall Street. They sold the magazines for € 1.25 billion to the Finnish company Sanoma in 2001. For € 5.8 billion they bought IMS Health, a company that sells data for the sales of medicines to companies in the pharmaceutical and medical sector, if you can still follow me.

Sometimes I think back of those days in the sixties, when I did research on behalf of advertisers in VNU publications, clients that provided 80% of all income. The three new trends were introduced to us as refreshing and promising innovations, while many of us understood they might bring more alienation, uncertainty and income loss for workers and consumers than for managers.

                                        Spaarnestad directors Lucas, De Goeij and Emondts

 The Spaarnestad office building where I worked

                                       VNU head quarters in the rich village of Aerdenhout